Living Populism: Polarization and Quotidian Experience

ended

This project aims to offer a novel understanding of populism and its supporters. Through ethnographic research with left-wing populists in Spain, I will break with dominant academic approaches to populism, based largely in analysis of the discourse of party-elites. While Spain was once regarded as having resisted the rise of populist groups emerging in other Western European countries, since the 2008 financial crisis both left- and right-wing populist movements now command considerable support. In order to understand this boom in populist power, in this project I will explore the process and experience of populist subjectivation. Instead of treating ‘the people’ as a semiotic construct I will explore its purchase and functioning as a lived identity as I investigate the experience of being a populist subject. This will entail working closely with populist supporters in order to investigate the gendered subjectivities and domestic dynamics that exist in a co-constitutive relationship with illiberal political commitments. Among other results regarding populism’s domestic and gendered elements, this will add nuance to common-sense depictions of populism as inherently linked to an aggressive white masculinity. My focus on the everyday, lived elements of populist subjectivity will also involve a spatial analysis of populist politics. Drawing upon anthropological theories of place, I will analyse the spaces in which populist politics are made and are manifested. This will result in new information regarding how public spaces figure in populist mobilization and populist subjectivation. This project promises insights regarding the processes by which populist commitments are adopted by supporters, as well as critical information about populists’ subjectivities. These findings will be valuable in the nascent sub-field of the anthropology or populism, and will be of interest to the public and policy makers as they attempt to understand the global growth of populist politics.